Knowledge, Disciplines, Identities and the Structuring of Education
This chapter returns to the two questions with which the book began: ‘how should we think about knowledge today?’ and ‘is the emphasis on learning outcomes and on auditing and managing education achievements in schooling and higher education distorting an
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Knowledge, Disciplines, Identities and the Structuring of Education
A recent Israeli film, Footnote (2011), dramatised some generational change taking place in universities in the form of a story of a father and son who were both scholars in the same university department of Talmudic studies. The father, Eliezer, had laboured all his life on details of texts, using traditional methods of scholarship, and with his most revered achievement to the point where the film began being to have his work acknowledged in a footnote by the major expert in his field. The son, Uriel, was known for the free-flowing changes he had brought to his study in the field, moving outside the traditions of his discipline and freely drawing on anthropological and feminist perspectives. Unlike his father the son was charismatic, regularly on television, and very popular with his students. The film’s narrative turns on a misunderstanding about the most prestigious award made each year by the national Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The father thought the award was finally being made to him as a lifetime recognition of his career and scholarship, when in fact the prize committee had intended the award for the son. This film captures something of the changes in train in universities as knowledge institutions but at the same time tips the scales fairly heavily in the way it portrays two kinds of academics. In the film all the characteristics loaded onto the father seem designed to reinforce that stereotype that in everyday speech accrues to the adjective ‘academic’: dry, other-worldly, opposed to change, obsessed with things that do not matter and that are not useful. And the characteristics associated with the son seem designed to display the full array of qualities university reforms in Australia are looking for in contemporary academic workers: modern, interdisciplinary, a popular teacher, a good media presenter, doing research which can be readily communicated to the public, in tune with the agendas of the day. But the tipping of the scales in these stereotypes skates over some issues we have been trying to take a close-up look at in this book, in particular what is it about disciplinary study that matters, and how do Australian academics who have been trained in history and physics see their work and agendas today? © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 L. Yates et al., Knowledge at the Crossroads? DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2081-0_14
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The ‘at the crossroads’ issue that was most foregrounded in this study in relation to the conditions in which teachers and academics now work was about the impact of changed forms of management of their work. More specifically, issues were raised about the effect of curriculum decisions and performance measures when these were designed for and interpreted by management purposes from outside the field, particularly the use of generic rather than field-differentiated ways of measuring and seeing achievement. These management agendas and measures have
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